The Use of E-Commerce and E-Business - Essay Example

The use of e-commerce and e-business Introduction People have to use e-commerce and e-business in a mix blend and the company leaders have to use them in different perspectives for the sake of their products sale in the market. As both the terms look same but there are certain differences which exist between them. Whenever we have to observe the word ‘e’ then it is denoted for electronic networks and it is used as a tradition for innovative electronic technologies like internet, electronic data interchange, software applications used for procurement purposes. These electronic technologies play a vital role in improving the business process and also help in maturing these processes after adoption of reasonable business strategies. The electronic commerce plays a vital role in those processes which are concerned with the customers, suppliers or vendors, products of interest, sales, marketing, and product delivery. In it there is also the involvement of those materials which are required for production and procurement purposes. The electronic commerce provides better opportunities for generating revenues and provides new business models. Further e-commerce is a tool which helps in strengthening the relationships among business partners. The implementation of e-commerce is very easy and we can easily integrate our existing business processes with it. With the help of e-commerce we can easily integrate different websites which are at the end of customers, companies, vendors or suppliers and intermediaries. E-commerce is a part of electronic business but e-business is comprised of many other processes which are involved in production, human resource management, finance, administration, and production and risk management processes. E-business is a very important field which plays a vital role in economy revival. The major focus of e-business is on internal processes of an organization. Though difficult to implement for different integrations like integration of systems of a company, customers, business partners, suppliers, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) systems and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems but it provides better solutions in cost reduction and ultimately improving the productivity and revenue rate. But with the adoption of e-business strategy the processes of the company will become efficient and overall costs will reduce and the rate revenue generation will increase. Salesforce.com The salesforce.com is a web-based customer relationship management system (CRM) and is providing services to its customers efficiently. It provides a greater opportunity of integration with other CRM systems which are implemented across the world and the customers can get the benefit from it either they are working any where in any department of a company. There are certain benefits which are associated with it such as low costs, improved efficiency of employees, it is a better call centre, and provides better sales opportunities to its stakeholders in a more satisfied way. There are certain issues which are associated with the implementation of salesforce.com that if the proper attention would not be given to maintenance then the data will become obsolete and will not be reliable for future use so it demands a proper consideration of employee efficiency for using it. According to my experience Salesforce solution is an important tool to generate revenue. For revenue generation it would be an important value added factor that we must provide free delivery of products at home. The customer services will be provided through online and telephonic services and for generating good revenues it is very essential for the company that company must offer lucrative customer packages for purchasing different products up to a certain finance limit. That the company can offer them some gifts or the company can offer some rebate in the overall charges and this is very essential for enhancing the customer circle or for customer attraction. There are some issues about salesforce.com. The online CRM service provider salesforce.com often suffers a downtime and it is the latest problem which is being noticed. The downtime can cause severe problems for the business partners and customers. Salesforce.com, leading Software as a Service vendor (SaaS), also faced outages across parts of its network. And when the salesforce.com is upgraded it disrupts the application. So the problem analysis can be written as software as a service vendors claim non-disruptive upgrades is an important reason customers should buy online, rather than on-premises, software. In this instance, Salesforce.com did not insulate its customers from downtime and inconvenience associated with an upgrade. Outsourced software services remain a great option for many customers, but the marketing hype sometimes outstrips reality. Whether online or on your own server, critical points in the software lifecycle, such as upgrades for example, can (and do) cause end-user disruption. So the salesforce.com should do some remedial work on its release and testing processes. Salesforce.com is a web service provider of customer relationship management system. The salesforce offers hosted applications that manage customer information for sales, marketing, and customer support, providing clients with a rapidly deployable alternative to buying and maintaining enterprise software. Salesforce.com applications are used for generating sales leads, opportunities, contacts, customer information, and tracking customer interaction. It analyses and segments the customers and prospects, track the marketing effectiveness, and generate valuable reports from the data. As the salesforce.com runs on the Internet, helpful time saving resources are integrated into the application and made available in order to provide real-time information about the prospects and customers including financial information, news, and stock quotes on your accounts. This service is very convenient and affordable for businesses that want to know their customers. Salesforce.com can benefit companies from small to large size by offering the services that will increase company efficiency and productivity There are certain notable strengths which are associated with Salesforce.com. The salesforce is 800 pound software application and is a sort of service CRM industry. The company and especially the CEO are bold and aggressive and not showing flexibility and the CEO is also unapologetic for the said brand and this one is the major strength of the software success. Another strengthening feature is the AppExchange which is a large and growing third party software directory. AppExchange can provide several types of broad solutions to compliment the salesforce.com CRM subscription. Another strengthening feature is the adoption of innovative approaches for the application and the company is expanding its on demand CRM solution with the integration of some other value added solutions like Apex which is used as a development platform, then there is the introduction of content exchange which is used to manage the contents. In the last the integration of successforce is for the user community. In perspective of value the professional edition of the salesforce is one of the best customer relationship management systems and the subscription of the system is being valued in the business market. The supporting tools of Salesforce.com like Apex and AppExchange are very innovative tools but there are some issues which are related to the use of these supporting tools. The major issue which is concerned with the use of AppExchange is the expensive virtual catalogue. The reason of high costs of AppExchange is that it is a third party business solution. The integration of AppExchange with Salesforce.com would provide a full advantage of the SaaS hosted delivery model. The integration of AppExchange with the Salesforce.com overcomes many shortcomings of the Salesforce solution. Another thing which is noteworthy is that each AppExchange provider hosts the applications on its own platform or domain so there is a prominent issue of contract management i.e. the user of Salesforce solution would maintain multiple contracts with different companies. With the strengths which I have stated above there are some weaknesses which are associated with salesforce. There is lack of flexibility in customizing the application though lot of customization tools are provided. The salesforce is supporting half million users round the world with the same solution and it is not very easy to take a sharp turn from the said solution because its not an easy task to customize the application according the company will. In salesforce there is lack of functionality so the company is taking into account the availability of other tools like oracle on demand and Aplicor which would help to compensate for the lacking functionality. Another major issue or weakness is the system downtime. The system downtime and service interruptions over the last two years have been a major sore spot for many customers. Another weakness is the company has not defined still any service level agreement or SLA for the customers even the small and midsize businesses also deserves the service level agreement. The multi-tenant architecture of the salesforce is considered as strength by the company but the analysts have a different opinion about it. In their opinion it is only a cost savings benefit to the CRM hosting company and provides reduced autonomy, flexibility and customization capabilities as compared to a single tenancy alternative. Recently there are only two systems which are providing single tenant hosting one is SAP and the other one is Aplicor. The way in which the salesforce.com is helping the web based CRM industry is very different from other softwares which are competitors of salesforce.com. The salesforce is paving the way for delivering the product advancements from customer relationship management software towards a software platform or SaaS operating system. The Salesforce SaaS operating system is capable of supporting many other SaaS solutions across the business boundaries. As the Salesforce.com is not only showing competition for the available customer relationship management SaaS solutions but in it’s domain it is also encompassing the platforms of other major companies like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This very approach of the Salesforce.com software would bring lot of market share for the company. Lessons Learnt There are number of lessons which I have learnt from Salesforce solution. When someone want to launch an electronic business then first of all it is necessary that the solution must be cost effective. Cost effective in the sense that the overall costs incurred by the companies, after adoption, must be minimal. The system or CRM application must be efficient under the desired circumstances. The business application must provide better business opportunities to all the stakeholders. The given online business solution must be able to generate revenue otherwise the struggle would yield nothing except mere wastage of time and money. Another lesson which is being learnt is that the system must not suffer the downtime because the smooth availability of services is very essential for achieving good market share. The application must be designed in such a way that it must provide good collaboration among all the business partners. The application must be a universal type of application and would provide services to all the business companies i.e. either large or small business enterprises. There are number of issues which are associated with Salesforce solution so keeping in view the issue of downtime my application would not suffer from downtime. As the salesforce solution is not easy to customize so I would try my best to design a system that would provide the facility to customize the application in a way that a new user will be able to easily customize the software and it would also be possible for different organizations to convert the whole business scenario within no time. The third party solutions add costs and the costly approach is not beneficial for the organizations. The third party solutions add costs due to continuous maintenance of the added features and also due to the overall cost of purchase and training. I would try to provide an application which will contain all the necessary features instead of providing the third party solutions to overcome the shortcomings of the application. So I would provide an application which will be providing a well integrated environment instead of using the components on the shelf. Interoperability in Electronic Business The interoperability in electronic systems can be treated as the way in which the two or more systems or components have to share the information. Same is the case with electronic business applications. These applications serve as the sender and the receiver. The sender is which sends the information and the receiver is which request the information. So a sort of information exchange exists between the two applications. On the basis of this information exchange many tasks are performed in an appropriate manner. The interoperability of electronic business applications is based on three major layers i.e. The communication layer, the business process layer, and the document layer. As it is said that e-commerce is about business transactions on internet but basically the e-commerce is related to the flow of information. And this flow of information is only possible when the interoperability among all the collaborating solutions will be provided at a very high level. SCM and E-Commerce in Business Supply chain management system is vital in the key success of an organization. Industries in the present times are focusing upon SCM for the better management of their infrastructure. For generating good revenues the industry leaders are introducing innovative e-commerce techniques in the global market. In the traditional SCM system the collaboration among business partners was not very strong but with the e-commerce and SCM a better collaboration can be obtained. There are certain issues which are related with the traditional procurement and these issues forced the organizations to adopt e-commerce in the domain of SCM. One notable thing is that the implementation of e-commerce in most of the industries is still not emphasized. The adoption of electronic commerce is very essential in a traditional environment the coordination among all the stakeholders is very time consuming and costly but the integration of e-commerce and SCM solves this kind of problems in logistics. Further in traditional approaches a very long time period is required to streamline the procurement processes but in case of electronic procurement this problem can be solved within the limited timeframe. In most of the industries the adoption of e-commerce is in the initial stage and there is the need of some struggle to convince the industry leaders about the benefits of e-commerce and its role in procurement, product purchase, services and product delivery. All the industries are trying to reduce the overall expenditure of procurement process without the awareness of e-commerce. So there is the need to introduce the benefits of e-commerce and its integration with the existing systems. E-commerce also plays a vital role in reduction of procurement costs which ultimately adds advantages in the industry court. Industry Issues and E-Commerce With the introduction of innovative technologies in the market like internet, e-procurement, and bar codes now it is possible that a firm can easily solve the issues related to management, production, product quality, product delivery, customer satisfaction and many others. Information Technology or e-commerce would play vital role in reducing the inventory levels, and would update the inventory within no time. The adoption of innovative technologies would surely have a positive impact on the industry that it would help in lowering the uncertainty and high costs. In the presence of all these issues which are described here there are some other issues which are associated with the implementation of electronic business strategies. The issues which are associated with electronic business strategies include the need of sufficient budget for the implementation of IT infrastructure and after the implementation there is the need of sufficient budget for the training of the employees who are quite unfamiliar with these technologies. Ethical Issues There are many ethical issues or considerations which must be taken into account to manage an organization. The first ethical issue is about the privacy of data. The data which is gathered in the organization is used in a justifiable way or not. At corporate or enterprise level the data is used in many ways for example to increase business, control expense, enhance the profitability in the organization, and for the sake of gaining market share. So the organization must use this data for the specific purpose for which it is gathered instead of using it in multiple scenarios for gaining commercial benefits because it would induce the factor of ethical dilemma. So being a manager it would be difficult for me to decide that what to do and what not to do. Another issue which being a manager I have in my mind for my organization is the effort and expense which I would incur to analyse the ways of data access and analyse the privacy of the data. The negative use of data can produce severe or critical implications for the organization. Being a manager I would like to enforce the people to sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements) and noncompeting clauses in employment contracts, legal documents that restrict their ability to share information with other future employers even to the point of disallowing them to join certain companies or continue to participate in a particular industry. Good management is considered as a measurement tool also. So it is essential that a manager must monitor the efficiency of the employees that what they are doing for the good sake of organization and how the technology is being used by them. So being a manager I would cater also for the said issue. Because it is very essential to monitor that what sort of data is visited by the employees is the data or the website is suitable or not in the context in which it is accessed. Accuracy is also considered as one of the major factor which contributes well in revenue generation. On the basis of accurate information collection the effective decision making can be performed but for good quality there is the need of budget and enhancement in quality productivity. The quality assurance in a business environment can only be applied at the level of data. Technology has enabled vastly more complicated and interconnected processes, such that a problem in a process has a ripple effect on the rest of the process. So the accuracy is considered as a major dream in electronic business but to achieve it at an ideal condition is not possible. Another most important ethical issue is the issue of security. The security is a sort of lock at the out gate of an office and it prohibits all those who are not authorized to enter. So there are number of challenges which are induced in the business scenarios due to the advent of innovative technologies. Networks can be breached, personal identification information can be compromised, identities can be stolen and potentially result in personal financial ruin, critical confidential corporate information or classified government secrets can be stolen from online systems and web sites can be hacked. So being a manager these things must be taken into account which come in the domain of security breach. As a manager I would define the specific security policy to handle the issues related with security breach because if a manager is not going to do specific actions and a system user, customer, individual or an organization is not going to do the care about security of a system which they are using then the leakage of secret information can cause severe threats to the economy of an organization and the responsible persons do not have to right to hold such positions in the organization. Summary In the report it is evident that different industries are improving all the processes at organization level. In different industry in the past the management was focusing on increasing production and generating revenues due to these two factors they were able to attract their franchisees that they have to show interest in their brands. But now they can reduce the total costs and can enhance their brands with the adoption of innovative technologies. The integration of marketing and procurement operations with ecommerce showed that the persons who are involved in supply chains assure that the integration of innovative technologies is warmly welcome. For electronic business there is need of training of the staff persons and the notable thing is that they must have to observe the importance of the benefits of electronic systems. The electronic business is a continuously changing area and the electronic systems are very flexible and can be modified and upgraded according to the needs of the organization. The electronic business technologies are serving as an important management tool for increasing the overall performance of the supply chains. The e-procurement in different industries is in an infancy state and a rapid increase is expected in the functionality of e-commerce that would assist in making strong relationships between suppliers and buyers using electronic environment. From the benefits of e-commerce it is obvious that it would increase the rate of adoption of innovative technologies, if the doubts related to e-commerce, are reduced to a level of utmost satisfaction of industry experts. The said research would help the industry experts in all the areas of different departments to better plan for the future adoption of IT/IS or e-commerce technologies. When the firms have to switch from traditional approaches to innovative online solutions then it would help the firm in significant savings, improvement in the production and increase in the operational efficiencies. Using electronic systems e.g. e-procurement there would be better communication between business partners. Future Prospects In future the research can be performed in this area in number of ways. The longitudinal case studies are better to explore the implementation and integration of e-commerce with existing managerial approaches in different domains of an industry. Further a supplier side case study would help to learn about their experiences after the implementation and adoption of e-commerce. We can do a structured survey on the basis of key findings after conducting different case studies in different domains and can gather data about the opinions of decision makers on adoption of e-commerce or e-business and its implementation at corporate level. There is need of close interactions among all stakeholders for properly understanding the requirements for implementation of innovative technologies and to develop systems that add value to the bottom line and thus provide incentives to all the stakeholders. The current systems are providing the processes which are not mature but on the other hand the implementation of electronic procurement in many industries depends on the issues like that is the technology manageable or not and whether the firm has realized the benefits of integration of e-commerce with its existing systems after deploying the innovative technology. Further this academic research would help in future that with the advent of e-commerce what sort of industry objectives can be streamlined. Bibliography Cheng De- Qin. (2005). Personal Data Protection in Electronic Businesses. ICEC’05, August 15–17, 2005, Xi’an, China. Dean. E. Woldridge. Trends in Electronic Business Data Systems Development. The Romeo Woldridge Corporation. Los Angeles, California. Jian Yang, Mike P. Papazoglou.(2000). Interoperation Support For Electronic Business. Communications of ACM Kun-Lung Wu, Philip S. Yu. Report on Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Snehamay Banerjee, Ram L. Kumar. (2002). Managing Electronic Interchange of Business Documents. Communications of ACM. Victoria Hill. Book Review: Success with Electronic Business: Design, Architecture And Technology of Electronic Business Systems. Address: http://mmcisPM.wcomnet.com Yildiray Kabak, Asuman Dogac. (2010) A Survey and Analysis of Electronic Business Document Standards. 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